I am endorsing Megan Byrd-Sanicki and Justin Colannino for the Board of Directors of the Open Source Initiative. As an individual member of the OSI, I intend to vote for Megan. I intend to advise Affiliate Members to vote for Justin Colannino.
I’ve been on the Open Source Initiative board of directors for four years and have seen a lot going on in the organization during that time, as a board member, as an officer of the board, and as an activist focused on ethics in technology.
I pick these two candidates out of sincere enthusiasm for both of them, but I also pick them out of concern for the future of the OSI and open source.
These candidates as people
I will start off by disclosing that I actually just really like Megan and Justin. I think they’re both great humans who do wonderful things and are genuinely nice. They have traits I admire – they are generous, work hard for what they believe in, and keep their egos in check.
Megan and Justin are presenting themselves as people in their running from the OSI board. They work for two of the major tech companies (Google and Microsoft, respectively), however they don’t present themselves in context of their employers. They instead focus on their work for the open source community as members of the open source community.
They have lots of experience with non-profit organizations – having worked for important non-profits in the open source ecosystem, and continuing to volunteer within the community outside of their paid work.
These candidates as potential board members
Megan has an incredibly impressive non-profit background and an amazing ability to get things done. She knows how organizations work, what they need to work, and how to make that happen. The OSI needs to expand its organizational capacity through hiring and recruiting non-board volunteers. Megan understands this and knows how to make it happen. In spite of its age, the OSI lacks a lot of the infrastructure necessary for a growing non-profit, and I believe she’ll help rectify that.
For the past several months Megan has served as an advisory resource to the OSI – connecting us with consultants and experts to help with these organizational issues. She has demonstrated a desire to see the OSI succeed by actually helping it take the steps forward it needs to.
When we were making the decision to appoint board members, Megan was nominated by multiple people. I reached out to the nominees I could find contact information for. I had a great conversation with her, during which time she expressed a concrete vision for how she could participate and what she would bring. She had actual plans and detailed knowledge on how to execute them. I was impressed then and I was ecstatic to see that her interest in the OSI continued such that she stepped up to run for the board.
I’ve known and worked with Justin in several different FOSS contexts. He’s worked with friends of mine in a wide range of legal contexts – covering just about everything lawyers do in open source. I respect his expertise and opinions not just because he has shown himself to be knowledgeable and trustworthy, but because others I respect hold him in equally high regard.
Justin is familiar with the needs of non-profits from all of his work with them over the years – as an employee, as counsel, and as a volunteer. He understands what non-profits need to succeed from his years of experience. He is dedicated to the success of FOSS organizations and projects in ways I have seen few others demonstrate. I would especially like to highlights Justin’s work in helping to set up the legal foundations that enable Outreachy to be so successful and help so many people.
Justin is, of course, an expert in licensing and would be a boon for the organization. He goes a step further than just knowing about licensing and the Open Source Definition through theoretical and practical experience. Justin really believes in the ethics behind the OSD.
My major concerns
When defining myself in the context of open source, I am above all else a true believer and user freedom activist. This is what drives all the work I’ve done and do in my professional and volunteer life, from starting my involvement as a organizer at Penguicon in 2007; my volunteering with Debian, the OSI, the Software Freedom Conservancy, and Software Heritage; my work at the Berkman (Klein) Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, One Laptop Per Child, MIT, the Free Software Foundation, and the GNOME Foundation; and my many additional projects relating to FOSS communities, some of which you can find published in the Journal of Peer Production.
My fear for the future of open source is that it becomes overly controlled by corporate interests. I think it is currently on this path and will only become worse if things continue the way they’re going. The OSI carries responsibility for this, as well as other individuals and organizations. It is imperative moving forward the the OSI is led by people who focus on the rights recognized and protected by the process of open source licensing. The board members need to understand the way open source fits into the narrative of our undeniable human rights.
Megan and Justin both work for some of the largest, most monolithic, and, at times, most egregious tech companies out there. However, these companies have also done a lot of good under their guidance. Most importantly, however, is that Megan is not running as an employee of Google and Justin is not running as an employee of Microsoft. They are running as people who care about the future of open source.